But Eddie was strong — and smart. Instead of trying to batter Trace off, he allowed himself to fall back under her weight, using his coat to wrap her head. For a couple of seconds, he lay on his back with her, writhing and cursing as he fought to keep her jaws away from his throat. Only then did Rafferty appear. She was wearing the white jeans and college sweater I’d seen folded up on her bed at the house, the same clothes she’d been wearing on the night she died. Her wavy blond hair was mangled with blood. In her right hand, she was carrying a rock.
Terrified, Eddie kicked back hard, making crescents in the grass with the heels of his boots. “No!” he cried as Rafferty raised the rock.
What was she doing? This wasn’t part of the plan. “Rafferty, don’t kill him!” I begged. “Stop! They’ll think I did it!”
And she faltered, but not because of my plea. She stared into the distance and gasped three times, each breath building on top of the last. The rock fell out of her hand. “Michael,” she whispered, and covered her chest.
“Rafferty?” I said, more terrified now than Eddie was.
And she held out a hand to me — and faded away.
The effect on Trace was immediate. She yowled in confusion and tried to wriggle out of Eddie’s grasp. Sensing the fight going out of her, Eddie rolled them down the embankment, punched her in the head and threw her aside. The beating didn’t seem to harm Trace any, but she was a different dog all the same. She turned a low circle with her tail between her legs, howling pitifully into the wind. Eddie wiped his mouth and staggered away from her, up the slope and back toward me. As we faced each other, my phone rang again.
“Give it,” he growled.
I backed into the wind.
His pace increased. “I said give it!”
“No,” I said, stumbling on the scarred and bumpy ground. All my options were gone, except one. I took the phone from my pocket — and hurled it behind me, over the cliff.
He swore an oath to the devil and stormed forward, picking me up in a handful of denim, forcing me beyond the signs, to the edge. The sea roared without choosing sides. I managed a half glance over my shoulder. Amazingly, the phone was still ringing. It had fallen among a spill of loose rocks, not far from the old viewing platform.
For the last time, Eddie checked his surroundings. The couple and their spaniel had drifted away. Trace had limped off toward the road.
He pushed me toward the barriers. “Climb over. Down to the platform.”
I shook my head. “I’ll never reach the phone from there.”
“I’m not asking,” he said. And he pulled out a knife. Spots of rain made patterns on the blade as he lifted it toward my quivering throat. He flicked it upward, almost nicking my chin. “Climb.”
The barriers were nothing but a few metal panels anchored to some hefty crossbeams of wood, just below the point where the drop began. Any kid with a spark of adventure in his soul could have scrambled over them with ease. I reminded myself that Freya had done it on the morning all this began. I whispered her name as I found a hold on an exposed end of wood. If I hadn’t been so pushy about us going to see Aileen, Freya wouldn’t be where she was now — and nor would I.
“Get a move on,” said Eddie.
I straddled the top panel, chafing my thigh as I dropped down the other side, onto the steps. Eddie followed by the same route, making the panels bend and boom. He bustled me around and pushed me down the steps, yelling, “Get up!” when I slipped on a bed of rain-softened lichen. Every footfall raised my heartbeat by five. I was panting by the time we stepped onto the platform.
“Are you gonna kill me?” I turned to face him.
The wind whipped at the edges of his coat. “No,” he said. He looked crazy now, edgy. He rolled the knife in his hand and put it away. “We’ll let nature take care of that. Put your hands on the rail. The broken one.”
I started to shake.
“Do it,” he said.
The topmost of the two rails had rusted at one end, leaving holes in the aged metal. As I grabbed it, it creaked a dangerous warning. One good push and it was going to snap. Far below, the waves gathered like a shoal of fish. Underneath the dark tide, the rocks awaited.
“Let me go,” I pleaded. “Even if you make me jump, they’ll find the phone.”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “One kick and that rubble goes into the sea. You should have let it go, Malone, all the stuff with the girl and the dog. You should have just accepted the fact that the papers get it wrong sometimes. The irony is, I’ll probably be the one who snaps the pictures when Streetham writes up your ‘tragic’ accident.”
At that point, I turned from the rail and rushed him. The impact knocked him back against the cliff face. He swore as his head hit the rocks, but the struggle was short-lived and hardly worth it; he was just too strong for me. With one huge shove, he pushed me toward the center of the platform. The boards creaked and the iron supports underneath them lurched, throwing me onto my knees. Eddie stormed forward and kicked my shoulder with the sole of his boot, tumbling me toward the rusted rails. I put out a hand and grabbed the lower rail. It immediately broke, pulling away from the rock and mortar it was once embedded in. From somewhere, I found the strength to snap it from its opposite joint and rap it hard across Eddie’s shins. He screamed in agony but came at me before I could hit him again. He grabbed the rail and pressed it across my chest, pushing me against the one last piece of horizontal metal between me and the drop. For the first time, in terror, I let slip about UNICORNE. “Don’t do this,” I gasped. He was almost crushing the air out of my lungs. “I know people, an organization. They’ll look for me and work it out. They’ll hunt you down.”
He laughed in my face. “You’re a weird kid, Malone. If I didn’t want you dead, I’d make you front page news. You and your dog and your scarecrow of a girlfriend.”
That tipped me over the edge, but not in the way Eddie Swinton was expecting. I couldn’t take any more taunts about Freya, not with her lying in a hospital bed. He pushed and the rail behind me broke. But as the dread of that awful fall washed over me, every nerve in my body lit up and I experienced a powerful reality shift, all wrapped up with thoughts of survival and thoughts of Freya. The next thing I knew, everything had reversed: I was on the platform and Eddie was falling through the rails. He screamed as the top support gave way and his body folded into the void. I was sure he was doomed, but he somehow managed to throw out an arm and grab the base of an upright with one hand. He swung like a limp flag waiting for a breeze, his fingers turning white as they clawed to keep hold.
“H-help me,” he stuttered.
At that moment, I heard the panels boom and saw Klimt’s aide, Mulrooney, coming over the barrier.
“Michael!” a woman’s voice shouted from above.
Chantelle was on the cliff top, looking down. “Stand back. Mulrooney will deal with this.”
But as Mulrooney made it to the bottom of the steps, the whole platform collapsed, taking Eddie with it. Mulrooney flung an arm around my chest and hauled me to safety, turning me away from the sea and Eddie’s screams. “Don’t look,” he said. “It won’t be pretty.”
I didn’t look, but I did hear a distant thud, a morbid sound that would haunt me forever. For whatever reason, good or bad, I had made a man fall to his death.
“We need to get you out of here,” Mulrooney said. “It won’t be long before someone reports his car.”
“H-how did you find me?” I was shivering with fear.
“Your UNICORNE trace. The signal was good in Holton, weaker here, which delayed us. Next time, tell us what you’re planning, Michael.”
“My phone.” I could hear it ringing again. Poor Mom, what had she done to deserve a son like me?
Mulrooney scanned the rocks. “I see it,” he said quietly. “Go to Chantelle. I’ll get the phone.”
Against his advice, I looked down at the water. I could see no sign of Eddie, just a single wooden plank bobbing on the se
a. “It’s too dangerous. You’ll …”
“Not for me,” Mulrooney said. And he did something quite extraordinary. He moved along the rubble to the farthest point of safety, then squeezed his eyes shut and put out his hand. I heard a scratching sound. Amazingly, the phone jiggled out of the rocks and almost jumped the short space, into his hand. He wiped some algae off the broken screen and handed it over. “Phone your mother,” he said. “Remember, you’re supposed to be in town.”
Back on firm ground, I exchanged a few words with Chantelle and accepted her offer of a lift home. As I walked toward their car, I spotted Trace lying at the side of the road. During the drama with Eddie, I hadn’t had time to think about Rafferty and why Trace had given up the fight. Now it began to swell in my mind. I knelt beside Trace and pushed my hand through her fur, whispering, “What’s the matter, girl? What is it, eh?” At the same time, I went through the motions of phoning Mom.
“Michael! At last. I’ve tried three times to get you.”
I put my hand on Trace’s head. She made a soft mewling noise. “I was in Cloops,” I lied, “down in the basement.” I’d heard Mom complain that it was hard to get a signal in there sometimes.
“Well, never mind. You’re here now.” She took a deep breath. “Look, sweetheart, I’ve got something to tell you. I’m afraid there’s no easy way to say this. I had a phone call from the hospital. Freya died ten minutes ago. I’m so sorry. Wherever you are, come home soon. Do you want me to fetch you?”
“No,” I croaked, though of course I meant yes. I wanted Mom more than anything right then. I ended the call and threw the phone down. Trace, the road, the grassland, the sky all began to merge into a watery mosaic. As I lowered my head, a tear fell onto a rock where a bunch of wilting flowers had been laid. The tear glistened for a moment, before soaking into a crack in the stone. “No-ooooo!” I screamed, for all the universe to hear.
Two hands slipped gently around my shoulders.
“It’s all right,” she whispered. “It’s all right. It’s all right.”
And I fell into the arms of Chantelle, and wept.
They held the funeral service at Freya’s local church, St. Matthew in the Field, an old stone building chiseled out of the hills overlooking Coxborough. I wasn’t sure I’d be welcome, or even allowed to go, but Mom made some phone calls and cleared it first with Freya’s father. I had told Mom nothing about Rafferty or her heart, just that Freya had been pampering Trace when she’d collapsed. We learned from Mr. Zielinski that it wasn’t the first time she’d had such problems, which was probably supposed to make me feel better. It didn’t. I felt responsible for Freya. For the whole of that week, before we went to church, I was under a shadow as black as the unicorn that symbolized Klimt and all he stood for. I had killed two people in the space of a day. And neither of them truly deserved to die.
In church, they described her as “a promising student” with a “uniquely effervescent personality.” Her father stood up and said she was a “rare gem,” a “daughter in a million.” I could have added several tributes of my own. In the short time I had known her, she had made me aware of how great a female friend could be. The closest I had come to that before her was Josie, who stood between me and Mom throughout the service, crushing my hand and sniveling like a dog left out in the rain. I counted twenty-six people in the church. There was no sign of Chantelle, Mulrooney, or Klimt.
As for me, I didn’t cry until the very end, when Freya’s aunt stood up and read a short poem that Freya had written about her mother. Most of the words floated into the rafters, but two lines opened me up like a well:
I put another rose on your grave today
I miss you in the silence when I walk away
Mom, who was already doing some hopeless origami with a bunch of wet tissues, whispered, “We’ll do that. We’ll take a rose from our garden and put it on her grave.”
And I cried for myself as much as for Freya, because if Mom knew the truth of the past few weeks, there would be no roses.
There would just be thorns.
We didn’t go to the burial itself because by then Josie was a walking marshmallow and I couldn’t face it, anyway. But five days later, after lunch on a Sunday afternoon, Mom did as she had promised and went into the garden and cut me a single white rose. She wrapped the stem in foil and put it on the sofa beside me. “I think it’s time, don’t you?”
Time to say good-bye. Time to get on with living.
I nodded and picked up the flower. The scent from it reminded me of Freya. She might have looked like something out of Gormenghast castle, but she always had a faintly floral smell about her.
I said, “Can I go on my own?”
This, I hoped, was a well-timed request. Two days after Freya’s death, I had “celebrated” a subdued birthday. I hadn’t had a party, but a bunch of my friends had come around for tea, including, wonder of wonders, Ryan.
On the doorstep, we’d put our fists together and ground our knuckles until it hurt. He’d called me an idiot; I’d called him a jerk. Mom, overhearing this bonding ritual, had sighed with false parental joy and said if only she’d kept the reindeer hats we’d worn last Christmas, we could have clashed antlers as well.
Hilarious.
The major present for my birthday was a brand-new bike, even better than the last one, a sign that Mom had moved on from my “accident.” I’d ridden it in the yard and the lanes around the house, but here was my chance for a real test.
Mom gave a quick nod. “All right, don’t be too late.” She tousled my hair. “Tea at five. Ride carefully. Be good.”
Be good. What a joke. I didn’t deserve a grain of Mom’s trust. As the pedals flew around, I kept telling myself that I ought to be feeling slightly heroic. I had solved a complex UNICORNE file and avenged a young girl’s untimely death. But what I felt most was an air of detachment. I now lived in a world where deceit was commonplace and fully expected.
I was the monster Mom feared I was becoming.
I was not a nice boy anymore.
The lying, of course, didn’t end with Mom. Chantelle and Mulrooney asked me to take them through everything I’d done to lure Eddie to the cliffs. Mulrooney smiled when I said about dipping Candy’s SIM card into my milk shake. “You’re a natural,” he said, and Chantelle added, “I’ll deal with the journalist.” I took that to mean that whatever Candy knew would be glamoured out of her. Any conversation she’d had with me would be dumped into her mind’s recycling bin. I asked them what would happen about Eddie, and would the police come and quiz me again? Mulrooney said, “No one’s going to bother you, Michael.” And he was right. The next day, a story appeared in the Holton Post, describing how one of their photographers, Eddie Swinton, had tragically died taking photographs from the old viewing platform on Berry Head. One of his cameras had been found in pieces on the rocks, but his body had been swept out to sea. As yet, it had not been recovered.
I found Freya’s resting place easily enough. Although the cemetery was large and divided by a maze of crisscrossing paths, most of the graves were old and grassed over. The new ones stood out because of their beautifully tilled earth; they looked like a host of skillfully worked molehills.
She was on a slope in a new patch of ground, close to some brambles and a railway line. It was too soon for a headstone, but her name was displayed on a temporary cross. FREYA ANN ZIELINSKI. I liked the simplicity of that.
There were plenty of flowers on the plot already, many with condolence notes attached. I took the rose from its foil and planted it right in front of the cross. I didn’t have a note, but I did have a white unicorn I’d cut from one of Josie’s mags. I propped it against the stem of the rose and told Freya it was a gift for Rafferty, to lead her to wherever she needed to be. I stood up and lowered my head. The sun passed behind a bank of clouds, fanning the grave with a ripple of shadows. I took a deep breath and was about to say something in Freya’s memory, when a voice from behind me said, “Hello, Micha
el.”
I didn’t even look round. “What do you want?”
“To pay my respects to your friend. What else?”
“You’ve got no respect for anyone,” I said. “Just get out of here, Klimt. I want to be alone with her.”
He ranged up beside me and threw a spray of lilies onto the grave. “I warned you this life wasn’t easy, Michael. Sometimes there are casualties. Freya’s death is regrettable, but it was not your fault.”
“Try telling her father that. Or Aileen Nolan. Or Josie, even. Why don’t you go back to your UNICORNE coal mine. Leave Freya in peace. And me, too.”
He smiled and steepled his fingers. “We both know that won’t be possible. Besides, I have to debrief you before we move on to your next mission.”
“I don’t want another mission.”
“Of course you do. We have much to accomplish, you and I.” A slow freight train clattered past. He seemed to be enjoying the rattle of the tracks, as if it amused him to work out the ratio of wheels to cars. “I assume I’m correct in thinking that you changed your reality during your skirmish with the photographer?”
Skirmish? That was an understatement. I looked down at Freya’s grave, then off to one side. A crow had just landed on a headstone a short distance away. It was quickly joined by another. “It just happened, like it did before. He was going to push me over the cliff and I …” I covered my eyes; I couldn’t bear to relive it. “All she had to do was scare him off. Then none of this would have happened.”
“She? Rafferty was with you?”
“I asked her to help me.”
“Interesting,” he said.
Interesting? “She died as well, for good this time, when Freya’s — when her heart gave up.”
“But you connected to her plane at will,” he mused. “That’s impressive. You’re developing quite a skill set, Michael. Even your father couldn’t summon the dead.”